“So the stocking people weren’t so terribly unpleasant after all?” asked Betty slyly.
Babbie blushed faintly. “Well, you and Madeline made me cross. You gave in so to his chin. I suppose I was disagreeable, but I was perfect to-day, wasn’t I, Madeline?”
“Depends on what you mean by perfect,” Madeline told her. “If you mean that you made everybody in the place from the social secretary, or whatever Mr. Robert Thayer, Junior, calls himself, to the smallest cotton-spinner of them all fall madly in l——”
Madeline and the rest of her sentence found themselves smothered under a huge cushion, which Babbie pummeled viciously.
“Don’t bother me about that,” she commanded wrathfully. “One minute you say I’m haughty and disagreeable, and the next——”
“The next,” Betty told her comfortingly, “we only say you’re such a darling, that people can’t help seeing it, you silly child.”
“I don’t care,” sniffed Babbie tearfully. “I shan’t go over there again, and I shan’t be here for his old party. So now!”
After which declaration of rights, Babbie did her hair low in her neck, donned her most becoming afternoon dress, and asked a dozen adoring freshmen to tea with her in the stall named “Jack o’ Hearts.” As Babbie sat in the most secluded corner of the stall, it is doubtful if anything but the tip of her ear, a nodding plume, and an absurdly small hand stretched out to press more of Cousin Kate’s cookies upon a hungry freshman, could have been visible to the staid young gentleman who had his tea at a small table in the alcove opposite.
“He’s the new history professor,” one of the freshmen announced in a sepulchral whisper. “Isn’t he handsome?”
“No, he isn’t,” snapped Babbie. “Isn’t the new history professor, I mean. He’s something or other in a factory. So don’t be making plans to move into a history course after midyears, Susanna.”